Ten State Meeting – February, 2014

Ten State Meeting – February, 2014

So all best laid plans of mice and men don’t always come to fruition. My
plans were to blog every month and I am only 9 months behind. Then my plans changed to blog after every meeting I attended as a KAFP representative. So I am only 4 behind. So I am just going to blog as frequently as I can until my term is up in November. Here goes….
Ten State is a meeting for the leadership of State chapters of AAFP. This
year it was held in February in Hershey, PA. Yes there was a LOT of chocolate. And a lot of snow and ice and plane delays. I literally re-enacted the movie of Planes, Trains and Automobiles to get there.The meeting was actually attended by 12 states now (Pennsylvania, NJ, NY, Connecticut, Ohio, us, Virginia…..) so an update on the name may be coming soon.
The highlights of the meeting were about Innovation and the ‘opportunities” from surprises and evaluating the unexpecteds’ affect on our practices. We also learned about ethics in medicine and were given the book Inside Out Coaching (about Joe Ehrman the football standout) about being a transformational coach vs a transactional coach. The lecturer addressed how we relate to patients as we do with our children- are we absent, dismissive or really present for them? A challenge was to write down our ethics and values on a 3X5 notecard and be able to keep it to that small space. I’ll challenge you to do the same.
I am also learning that the networking and talking with other states’
physicians is a big part of the conferences and very educational on how they are handling the changes in Healthcare. Let’s all be thankful we don’t practice in New Jersey!!!! But there are some great things going on in other states and we need to be willing to look at new ideas for our membership as well as to keep Kentucky healthy.
Perhaps the thing we get the most from the conferences is that we need to be advocates for our specialty and get involved in advocating for changes in family medicine to help our patients. We are the key for any healthcare reform that will happen. Maybe we need to act like we are the key and control more of the healthcare decisions foisted on us by our legislature.